Site and the City

Monday 25th January

During my first session with the tutor, questions were raised about what site specific performance could entail. It was at this point that Steve showed us some of his past work from his undergraduate days as well as more recent projects. One of his pieces that I found particularly intriguing was his degree project which focused on an abandoned building which had previously housed bells. The piece focused on restoring the nostalgia of the bells to the town decades after they had been moved elsewhere. This then got me thinking about using Lincoln and its history to create a piece that plays homage to the history but in a contemporary setting. When exploring our site (Lincoln high street) something that was of particular interest was the ornate architecture of the buildings which are now corporate shops such as Fat face and Jack Wills. Delving into the history of what these buildings were before they were high street shops is something that I intend to explore further with my group later on in the devising process.

Joe Turner

Lincoln

A great and very productive first week on the Site Specific module with a huge amount covered in our first session together. 

We took a theoretical drift through some of the (un?)usual suspects to whet our appetites before taking to our heals and heading into the city.  A quick summary of some of those people and themes without stopping for breath:

Guided tours with Marcia Farquhar, Wrights and sites, Carlos celdran, Janet Cardiff, Forced entertainment, along the way covering Situationist practice/theory to include domination/ordering/refusal/embracing of city space by Spectacle, social hierarchy, capital, local identity etc., which led into discussion around the tacit agreements of site and social space more broadly, bringing in psycho-geography, quotidian dramaturgy and Erving Goffman, asking how does site/society perform to maintain an order of place and where is our historical, social position in all this? which took us into technology and surveillance to include expanded site specificity, GPS and peripatetic practices with Daniel Belasco Rogers, Jeremy wood, Christian Nold (emotional mapping) and more besides, which then took us back in time a little to question how myths, local, historical knowledge/research transforms architectures/built environments, starting with ready-mades and moving through Art and Objecthood (Fried 1968), prompting us to ask how object/environment implicates the viewer, activates space, becomes theatrical…introducing the palimpsest, overlaying histories, lies, narratives, Mike Pearson, Carl Lavery, Cathy Turner, Daniel Buren, Nick Kaye, Miwon Kwon…peppering bits of my work in to provoke debate about why a Satsuma is an art object that performs and why the sound of bells ringing in Nottingham and Australia is site specific.

After digesting all this we took a walk into the city to clear our heads and visualise our parameters, starting at the Ritz and ending at Steep Hill.  Along the way we stopped at Mr Chippy, watched through a distorted glass window as the lady in the hair salon prepared chemicals, listened to soft rock in the shopping centre whilst the man in the phone shop looked on bemused, and much more…

Next we will begin to look further at the potential of what all this looks like in practice.

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